While summer 2018 has been a scorcher, the high for February 1st and 2nd made it to 11º in Kari Fisher’s hometown in Minnesota, and single digits reigned during both school days. I got the email from one of my son’s high school teachers while I was teaching and didn’t have a chance to read it […]
public school
Trump’s First Year: Did the Working-Class Benefit?
Donald Trump ran for president on a populist and inclusionary platform. As he campaigned across the country, he appealed to increasingly larger numbers of Americans who felt forgotten by the country’s policies and politicians. Despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by three million, there’s no doubt that he tapped into the visceral […]
At What Price Common Core?
In the Kindergarten Classroom For decades, five-year-olds have been entering kindergarten with varying levels of academic proficiency. Some might be able to read. Others may know most of the alphabet, letter sounds and numbers. Children with these skills are usually ready to learn in the kindergarten setting on day one. However, there are plenty of […]
Mental Health Diagnoses
Through a Classist Lens
Many people believe that you’re born with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). As a person who has been diagnosed with ADHD myself and treated with Ritalin for years, I started doubting whether ADHD is really a biological-neurological disorder. For those who don’t know the disease, people suffering from this disorder have difficulty with memory and concentration, […]
A Hard Lesson about Free Money
“Congratulations, you have been awarded a scholarship by your high school foundation. You are invited to attend awards night and be recognized for your achievement,” the letter said. My daughter had applied to several hundred scholarships, four through her highly-ranked, public high school’s parent & legacy foundation. She received one scholarship from a community group […]
Is That What They Would Say?: Home Knowledge vs. School Knowledge
Two incidents from my school years illustrate the clash between home experience and school assumptions. In second grade, I was drawing in my Alice and Jerry book, a lovely book about the foreign country of the middle class where kids got surprise playhouses for their birthdays— built, painted, and transported by Dad and Grandpa who’d […]
Privatizing Driver’s Ed: a Lesson in Disenfranchisement
When I went to high school in Wisconsin, Driver’s Ed was a required course, first in the classroom where we learned in-depth about rules and safety, and then behind-the-wheel in a room of simulators which offered the physical experience of turning a key, and locating the brake, gas pedal, blinkers, and gear shift. Finally, we […]
The Unlevel Playing Field of High School Sports
I grew up thinking that even if some people were born to great privilege and others were born into much more challenging circumstances, there was one place where the contests were fair: sports. After all, everyone plays by the same rules, right? Apparently not. Every year, the Boston Globe compiles the won/loss record of all […]
Humiliation at School Should Be a Thing of the Past
Dozens of children at a Utah elementary school had their lunch trays snatched away from them before they could take a bite last month. Salt Lake City School District officials say the trays were taken away at Uintah Elementary School because some students had negative balances in the accounts used to pay for lunches, according […]
“Bring Enough for Everyone”: What We Lose When We Lose Public Education
Did your schoolteachers say, “Don’t bring [candy, toys, coveted items] to school unless you bring enough for everyone”? Mine did. Maybe they recognized how incapable children are of understanding the fundamental injustice of wealth inequality, of some people having immensely desirable things that for some reason cannot be attained by others. Those who endured segregation […]
Philly School Crisis Meets Pushback
While a group of determined teachers, parents and community activists rallied a small crowd in front of South Philadelphia High School on a rainy weekday, the powers-that-be in City Hall, Harrisburg and D.C. did nothing to avert an educational crisis that awaits 150,000 mostly poor and working-class students when school is due to open in […]
A Small Fish in a Big Pond
Junior year of high school, I was informed, was the most crucial one in laying out the roadway towards college. As one who was raised to never even consider not going to college, I was looking forward to engaging in the preparation for higher education. From an early age, I knew that the public school […]
Shame, School Lunch, and Passing
When I was in sixth grade, my family was eligible for free school lunches. I attended a small country school, without much class diversity, mostly farmers, some without indoor toilets in their homes. Even so, when I gave my lunch ticket to the student appointed to collect them, I noticed and she noticed that there […]
Class Reproduction by Four Year Olds
I watched how class played out in a preschool classroom, creating disadvantages for the already disadvantaged and privileges for those born into privilege. I spent eight months observing in a preschool classroom full of four years old. About half of the preschoolers in this classroom were from working-class families and were receiving scholarships to attend […]
Overlooking luck
Can someone please explain to Newt Gingrich that people not wanting a job typically doesn’t cause poverty; being unable to get a job causes poverty. I would strongly assert that very few people want to be unable to provide for themselves and their families. People who have only experienced privilege often do not recognize the […]
Hiding the lunch ticket
I was an outsider at my junior high school. Why was I ashamed of my family’s poverty? When my family lost its small business and home in Philadelphia and was forced to move to Brooklyn to live with one of my mother’s sister, I was in the middle of the last term of the sixth […]
A 4th of July Declaration of Dependence
It’s no small irony that on the 4th of July weekend our nation’s largest union surrendered a chunk of its independence. At their annual meeting in Chicago, the National Education Association’s Representative Assembly voted to support the use of student standardized test results in the evaluation of teachers. That vote alters the union’s previous opposition […]
Moving the Bar
At first glance, I thought that it was just another article about disappointing test scores. I almost didn’t click through to read it, in part because I spend so much time in my teacher education courses trying to contextualize the rhetoric about “the achievement gap” and testing and my students’ role as teachers in closing […]
From a Teenage Class Action Fan
My name is Liora and I’m fourteen years old. I’ve attended public schools my whole life except for the last year and half when I went to a private school. At this school, the classes were small and there was support and help anywhere and anyhow we needed. Not the case in public school. This […]
Learning about Class in Private School?
Like parents everywhere, we wanted to give our teenage daughter advantages we never had. High on our list was to provide her a much clearer class-consciousness than what we got as kids. Class issues are so fundamental to understanding how things work, or don’t, in our personal lives and in our world. So it’s a […]
